by Primo Levi
Our train was over five hundred yards long; the trucks were in a poor condition, the track also, the velocity derisory, not more than twenty to thirty miles an hour. The railway line was single tracked; the stations with a siding sufficiently long to permit halts were few: the train often had to be uncoupled into two or three parts and pushed on to side lines with complicated and sluggish manoeuvres, so as to allow other trains to pass through.
There were no authorities on board, except for the engine-driver and the escort, which consisted of the seven eighteen-year-old soldiers who had come from Austria to pick us up. Although they were armed to the teeth, they were plain, well-mannered creatures, gentle and naïve, as cheerful and happy-go-lucky as schoolboys on holiday, and totally lacking in authority and practical sense. Every time the train stopped, we saw them walking up and down the platform, with their weapons slung from their shoulders and a proud officious air. They paraded their importance as though they were escorting a convoy of dangerous criminals, but it was all on the surface; we soon realized that their inspection concentrated increasingly on the two family trucks, half-way down the train. They were not attracted by the young wives, but by the vaguely domestic atmosphere which emanated from those itinerant gypsy-like dwellings, and which reminded them perhaps of their distant homes and their recent childhood; but above all they were allured by the children, so much so that, after the first halt, they chose the family trucks as their daily domicile, and returned to the truck reserved for them only at night. They were courteous and obliging; they willingly helped the mothers, went to get water and chop wood for the stoves. They struck up a curious and one-sided friendship with the Italian children. They learnt various games from them, including that of the circuit: this is a game played with marbles rolled along a complicated path. In Italy it is supposed to be related to the Giro*; so the enthusiasm with which these young Russians assimilated it seemed strange to us, as there are few bicycles in Russia, and cycle races do not exist. At all events, for them it was a discovery: it was not unusual to see the seven Russians leave their sleeping-truck at the first stop in the morning, run to the family trucks, open the door authoritatively and pick up the still sleepy children and put them on the ground. Then they cheerfully dug out the circuit in the ground with their bayonets, and plunged into the game in great haste, on all fours with their weapons on their backs, anxious not to lose even a moment before the engine whistled.
On the evening of the 16th we reached Bobruisk, on the evening of the 17th Ovruch; and we realized that we were repeating the course of our last journey north, which had taken us from Zhmerinka to Slutsk and to Starye Dorogi, but in the opposite direction. We spent the interminable days partly sleeping, partly chatting or watching the majestic deserted steppe unfolding before our eyes. From the first days, our optimism lost a little of its shine; this journey of ours, which all appearances led us to hope would be the last, had been organized by the Russians in the vaguest and most careless of ways; or rather, it seemed as if it had not been organized at all, but decided by heaven knows whom, heaven knows where, with a simple stroke of the pen. In the whole train there were only two or three maps, disputed endlessly, on which we traced our problematic progress with difficulty; it was quite clear that we were travelling south, but with an exasperating slowness and irregularity, with incomprehensible deviations and stops, sometimes travelling only a few dozen miles in twenty-four hours. We often went to interrogate the engine-driver (there was no point in talking to the escort; they seemed happy merely to be travelling in a train, and it was of no importance to them to know where they were or where they were going); but the engine-driver, who emerged like a god of the underworld from his fiery cabin, spread out his arms, shrugged his shoulders, swept his hand in a semicircle from east to west and replied every time: ‘Where are we going tomorrow? I don’t know, dear friends, I don’t know. We are going where we find railway tracks.’
The person who endured the uncertainty and enforced idleness worst of all of us was Cesare. He sat in a corner of the truck, hypochondriacal and bristling, like a sick animal, and did not judge the countryside outside, or us inside the truck, worthy of a single glance. But his was a specious inertia; people in need of activity find opportunities everywhere. As we ran through a district covered with small villages, between Ovruch and Zhitomir, his attention was attracted by a brass ring worn by Giacomantonio, his shifty ex-partner from the Katowice market.
‘Will you sell it to me?’ he asked him.
‘No,’ Giacomantonio replied laconically, just as a start.
‘I’ll give you two rubles.’
‘I want eight.’
The bargaining continued for a long time; it seemed clear that both found it a diversion, an agreeable mental exercise, and that the ring was only a pretext, an excuse for a sort of friendly game, a practice bargain so as not to lose their skill. But it was not so; Cesare, as always, had conceived an exact plan.
To everybody’s amazement, he yielded quickly, and acquired the ring, which he seemed to prize enormously, for four rubles, a figure grossly disproportionate to the value of the object. Then he withdrew into his corner, and dedicated the rest of the afternoon to mysterious exercises, driving away with angry snarls all inquisitive people who asked him questions (the most insistent was Giacomantonio). He had taken pieces of different quality cloth from his pockets, and diligently polished the ring, inside and out, breathing on it every now and again. Then he took out a packet of cigarette paper, and carefully continued his work with it, with extreme delicacy, no longer touching the metal with his fingers; occasionally, he would lift the ring up to the light of the window, and study it, turning it round slowly as if it were a diamond.
Finally, what Cesare had been waiting for occurred; the train slowed down and stopped at a village station, not too large and not too small; the halt looked like being a short one, as the train remained on the main line in one section. Cesare got down, and began to walk up and down the platform. He held the ring half hidden against his chest, under his jacket. He approached the Russian peasants who were waiting, one by one, with a conspiratorial air, half showed it to them, and whispered nervously: ‘Tovarishch, zèloto, zèloto!’ (‘gold’).
At first the Russians did not listen to him. Then an old man looked closely at the ring, and asked the price; Cesare, without hesitating, said: ‘Sto’ (‘one hundred’); a modest enough price for a gold ring, a criminal one for a brass ring. The old man offered forty. Cesare pretended to be indignant and turned to somebody else. He continued like this with various clients, protracting matters and looking for the person who offered most; meantime, he kept an ear open for the engine whistle, in order to conclude the business and jump on to the train as it was leaving.
While Cesare was showing the ring to various people, we could see others discussing in small groups, suspicious and excited. At that moment the engine whistled; Cesare yielded the ring to the last bidder, pocketed about fifty rubles and rapidly climbed on to the train, which was already moving. The train ran for one, two, ten yards; then it slowed down again, and stopped with a great screeching of brakes.
Cesare had closed the running doors and was peering out of the gap, at first triumphant, then worried, finally terrified. The man with the ring was showing his acquisition to the other peasants; these passed it from hand to hand, turned it over on all sides and shook their heads with an air of doubt and disapproval. Then we saw the incautious purchaser, evidently repentant, raise his head and march resolutely along the train, in search of Cesare’s refuge; an easy search, as ours was the only truck with its doors closed.
The matter was taking a decidedly bad turn; the Russian, who was clearly no genius, perhaps would not have managed to identify the truck by himself, but two or three of his colleagues were already pointing with energy in the right direction. Cesare suddenly jumped back from his spy hole, and had recourse to an extreme measure; he crouched in a corner of the truck, and made us conceal him hastily under all the
available coverings. In a short time he disappeared under an enormous mass of blankets, eiderdowns, sacks and jackets; from which, listening carefully, I seemed to hear, muted and faint, and blasphemous in that context, words of prayer emerge.
We could already hear the Russians shouting in front of the truck, and banging against the doors, when the train moved off again with a violent jerk. Cesare re-emerged, as white as death, but recovered immediately: ‘Now let them look for me!’
The following morning, under a radiant sun, the train stopped at Kazàtin. The name did not seem new to me; where had I read or heard it? Perhaps in war bulletins? But I had the impression of a nearer, more immediate recollection, as if someone had spoken to me about it at length recently; after, and not before, the Auschwitz caesura, which snapped in two the chain of my memories.
Suddenly, standing on the platform, immediately in front of our truck, I saw my nebulous recollection personified: Galina, the girl from Katowice, the translator-dancer-typist of the Kommandantur, Galina of Kazàtin. I got down to greet her, full of joy and amazement at so improbable a meeting: to find my only Russian friend in this boundless land!
She had not changed very much; she was a little better dressed, and sheltered from the sun under a pretentious parasol. Nor had I changed much, at least externally; a little less puny and under-nourished than before, though just as ragged; but rich with a new wealth, the train standing behind me, the slow but sure engine, Italy nearer every day. She wished me a happy return; we exchanged a few hurried and embarrassed words, in a language which was neither hers nor mine, in the cold language of the invader, and we separated immediately, as the train was leaving. In the truck, which was jolting towards the frontier, I sat and smelt the cheap perfume which her hand had left on mine, happy that I had seen her again, sad at the memory of the hours spent in her company, of things unsaid, of opportunities unseized.
We passed through Zhmerinka once more, with suspicion, remembering the days of anguish we had spent there a few months before; but the train proceeded without difficulties, and on the evening of 19 September, after crossing Bessarabia rapidly, we were on the Pruth, at the border. In the deep gloom, as a sort of dismal farewell, the Soviet frontier police carried out a tumultuous and disorderly inspection of the train, searching (so they told us) for rubles, which it was forbidden to export; not that it mattered, as we had spent them all. We crossed the bridge, and slept on the other side, in the stationary train, anxious for the light of day to reveal Rumanian soil to us.
It was in fact a dramatic sight. When we threw open the doors in the early morning, a surprisingly domestic scene opened out before our eyes; no longer a deserted, geological steppe, but the green hills of Moldavia, with farms, haystacks and rows of vines; no longer enigmatic Cyrillic signs, but, right in front of our truck, a decrepit hovel, blue-green with verdigris, with clear writing on it, curiously similar to the Italian words: ‘Paine, Lapte, Vin, Carnaciuri de Purcel’, bread, milk, wine, pork sausages. And in fact, in front of the hovel there was a woman, who was pulling an enormously long sausage out of a basket at her feet, and measuring it by lengths like string.
We saw peasants like our own, with broiled faces and pale foreheads, dressed in black, with jackets and waistcoats and watch-chains over their bellies; girls on foot or on bicycles, dressed almost like ours, whom we could have mistaken for Venetian or Abruzzese peasant girls. There were goats, sheep, cows, pigs, chickens. But, standing at a railway crossing, to act as a check to any precocious illusion of home, was a camel, driving us back into another world; a worn-out, grey, woolly camel, laden with sacks, exhaling haughtiness and stupid solemnity from his prehistoric leporine muzzle. The language of the place sounded equally mixed to our ears; well-known roots and terminations, but entangled and contaminated in a millenary common growth, could be heard alongside others, of a strange wild sound; a speech familiar in its music, hermetic in its sense.
At the frontier took place the complicated and difficult ceremony of transference from the ramshackle trucks of Soviet-gauge lines to others, equally ramshackle, with a western gauge; and soon after we entered the station of Iasi, where the train was laboriously broken up into three parts; a sign that the halt would last for many hours.
At Iasi two notable things occurred; the two German women from the woods appeared from nowhere, and all the married ‘Rumanians’ disappeared. The smuggling of the two Germans across the Soviet border must have been organized with great audacity and ability by a group of Italian soldiers; we never learnt the exact details, but rumour had it that the two girls had spent the critical night of the passage across the frontier hidden under the floor of the truck, secreted between the rods and the suspension. We saw them walking on the platform the next morning, offhand and arrogant, bundled up in Soviet military clothes and covered in mud and grease. Now they felt safe.
Simultaneously, we saw violent family conflicts explode in the trucks of the ‘Rumanians’. Many of them, who had formerly belonged to the diplomatic corps or had been demobilized themselves from the ARMIR, had settled in Rumania and had married Rumanian women. At the end of the war, almost all of them had opted for repatriation, and the Russians had organized a train for them which should have taken them to Odessa, to embark there; but at Zhmerinka they had been attached to our luckless train, and had followed our fate; we never knew if this had happened through design or negligence. The Rumanian wives were furious with their Italian husbands; they had had enough of surprises and adventures and journeys and encampments. Now they had re-entered Rumanian territory, they were at home, they wanted to stay there and they would not listen to reason; some argued and wept, others tried to drag their husbands on to the platform, the wildest hurled their luggage and household possessions out of the trucks, while their children, terrified, ran screaming all around. The Russians of the escort had run to the scene, but they understood nothing and stood and looked on, inert and undecided.
As the halt at Iasi threatened to last all day, we left the station and wandered through the deserted streets, between low mud-coloured houses. A single, minute, archaic tram ran from one end of the city to the other; the ticket collector stood at a terminal; he spoke Yiddish, he was a Jew. With some effort we managed to understand each other. He informed me that other trainloads of ex-prisoners had passed through Iasi, of all races, French, English, Greek, Italian, Dutch, American. In many of these there had been Jews in need of assistance; so the local Jewish community had formed a relief centre. If we had one or two hours to spare, he counselled us to go as a delegation to the centre; we should be given advice and help. In fact, as his tram was about to leave, he told us to climb on, he would put us down at the right stop and would take care of the tickets.
Leonardo, Mr Unverdorben and I went; we crossed the dead city and reached a squalid, crumbling building, with temporary boarding in place of the doors and windows. Two old patriarchs, with a scarcely more opulent or flourishing air than ours, received us in a gloomy, dusty office; but they were full of affectionate kindness and good intentions, they made us sit on the only three chairs, overwhelmed us with attention and precipitately recounted to us, in Yiddish and French, the terrible trials which they and a few others had survived. They were prone to tears and laughter; at the moment of departure, they invited us peremptorily to drink a toast with terrible rectified alcohol, and gave us a basket of grapes to distribute among the Jews on the train. They also emptied all the drawers and their own pockets, and raked together a sum of lei which on the spot seemed to us astronomical; but, later, after we had divided it, and taken into account the inflation, we realized that its value was principally symbolic.
16
From Iasi to the Line
For several days we continued to travel towards the south, by small stages, across a countryside still enjoying summer, past towns and villages with barbaric, resounding names (Ciurea, Scantea, Vaslui, Piscu, Bràila, Pogoanele); on the night of 23 September we saw the fires of the petroleum wells of Ploe
sti blazing; then our mysterious pilot turned west, and the following day we realized from the position of the sun that our course had been inverted; we were once more navigating towards the north. Without recognizing them, we admired the castles of Sinaia, a royal residence.
By now our truckload had exhausted all its ready money, and had sold or exchanged everything, however small, which was thought to possess commercial value. Consequently, apart from occasional strokes of luck or lawless exploits, our only source of food was what the Russians gave us; the situation was not dramatic, but confused and enervating.
It never became clear who was responsible for the victualling; most probably the Russians of the escort, who drew at random the most ill-assorted, or perhaps the only available, rations from every military or civilian depot within reach. Whenever the train stopped and was uncoupled, each truck sent two delegates to the Russians’ truck, which was slowly transformed into a chaotic travelling bazaar; the Russians, with no regard for rules, distributed to these delegates provisions for their respective trucks. It was a daily game of chance; as regards quantity, the rations were sometimes scarce, sometimes Gargantuan, sometimes non-existent; and as regards quality, as unforeseeable as all things Russian. We received carrots, and yet more carrots, and yet still more carrots, for days on end; then the carrots disappeared, and the beans arrived. They were dry beans, as hard as pebbles; to cook them, we had to soak them for hours in whatever vessel we could lay our hands on, bowls, tins, pots, which we then hung from the roof of the truck; at night, when the train braked abruptly, this hanging forest oscillated violently, water and beans poured down on the sleepers, and scuffles, mirth and upheavals resulted in the dark. Potatoes came, then kasha, then gherkins, but without oil; then oil, half a bowl a person, when the gherkins were finished; then sunflower seeds, an exercise in patience. One day we received bread and sausage in abundance, and everybody breathed again; then grain for a week on end, as if we were chickens.
